


And Changed Our Faded State

by madamebadger



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anger Management, Gen, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 03:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3712687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Cassandra is half-mad with frustration, there's one thing that reliably helps her center herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Changed Our Faded State

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DancingCrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancingCrow/gifts).



Cassandra was, contrary to what she knew others thought, a reasonably self-aware person. She knew her strengths and she knew her weaknesses. About her strengths, she was, she thought, not arrogant, but also not falsely modest. About her weaknesses, she was forthright.

Dealing with uncertainty was not one of her strengths.

The Book of Secrets was merely an object, and not even a magical one. By itself it could do nothing. And yet she could not shake the feeling that it was taunting her, glowering at her, even where it sat on her table. Centuries of lies, centuries of betrayals, centuries of duty abrogated and privilege abused, and she could do—what? She could not look away, could not say _this is not my responsibility, this is not my problem_ , and yet there was no enemy to fight. It was like attempting to do battle with a fog, to put this right: and yet even worse, for it was not so much a fog but a miasma, poisoning everything it touched.

She lowered her head to her hands, feeling frustration bubble up within her, thick and murky.

“Not going so well, I take it?” said Leliana’s familiar voice from the doorway.

“No. _Maker_.” Cassandra shoved the book away. “I know there are more pressing matters than the fate of the Seeker order right now, but this—it drags at me, Leliana. It drags at me and I can neither do something about it nor ignore it.”

“Mm. I seem to recall that you used to have ways of dealing with this sort of thing.” Leliana leaned her hip against the doorframe and raised an eyebrow. “Ways besides shouting at Varric, I mean.”

Cassandra's mouth quirked. “Is that a hint?”

“A suggestion, perhaps,” Leliana said. 

Cassandra exhaled. “All right,” she said. “If anyone is looking for me—”

“I know where to send them,” Leliana said, and Cassandra nodded and got up, to gather the things she would need and make her way out of Skyhold.

High up in the mountains though it was, Skyhold was not a long walk from quite pleasant environs. There were several deep meadows full of flowers—many days you could see Josephine’s agents collecting blossoms to sweeten the rooms of visiting guests—and, a little farther along the path, a grove of trees. Cassandra headed directly for the grove, selected a likely-looking fir, and pulled a length of quilted padding from her bag to wrap around the trunk.

It—this odd ritual of hers—had begun with Anthony, when she had been only a small girl—a small girl with hay fever, red-eyed with a head full of mucus, sneezing and surly as only a sick child could be. She had been _supposed_ to be at her lessons, on the wide flagstone terrace behind the house overlooking the gardens—her brother sitting across from her, doing his correspondence—but having to stop every few minutes to blow her nose did not make her writing exercises (never terribly easy for her in the first place) any easier. (And it offended her dignity. Not that, in retrospect, she had _had_ much dignity at the age of six; but at the time it had seemed so.) A particularly sudden and violent sneeze had made her quill lurch across the page, dragging a scraggled blot of ink behind it, and ruining the work.

Her governess would not accept the sneeze as an excuse, she knew, which meant that she would have to rewrite the entire page. She flung down her quill and sat back in her chair, arms folded and mutinous at the world in general.

Anthony looked up, his expression serious but merriment in his eyes. She didn’t appreciate that merriment, and was considering throwing the quill at him when he said, “You know what makes you sneeze like that, don’t you, Cass?”

She eyed him, waiting for the joke. “What?”

“Trees.” She continued to eyed him. “I’m not teasing you, I’m quite serious. They make pollen and you’re allergic to it. That’s why it happens every year, but only certain times of the year.” He tapped his quill on the page. “You could stay inside. That would likely help.”

The wide doors yawned open behind them. Within, darkness and dankness and dust. Cassandra couldn’t remember living anywhere else, and yet it was never her preference to remain within its walls longer than she had to. It was worth a little sneezing, she thought grudgingly, to feel the sunlight. “No. Thank you.”

“Well, then I suppose there’s only one thing for it.” Anthony’s quill resumed its scratching across the paper. “Reclaim your Pentaghast honor by taking vengeance on that which has injured you.”

“What?”

“Punch a tree, Cass,” he said, with a chuckle.

She had known, even at that young age, that he was joking. But she looked at her ruined work, sneezed again, blew her nose, and made a decision. She was on her feet and crossing the terrace, and then the lawn, to the fringe of ornamental trees. Like everything in her uncle’s house, the gardens were showing the effects of poor upkeep—she was old enough to know that she and her brother and her uncle had a title and a grand house and sprawling grounds, but not much in the way of money to maintain any of those things—but the trees seemed to be thriving in their neglect.

She balled up her fist and landed a blow, hard, on the trunk of the tree. It stung her knuckles, but the jolt of triumph felt better, so she hit it again, and a third time. In the distance, she could hear Anthony laughing.

She hadn’t sneezed again for at least half a day.

Now, grown and certainly much too sensible a woman to believe that you could literally fight trees, Cassandra nevertheless finished tacking the quilting around the trunk of the fir she’d selected. (One thing she had learned quickly as a child was that however tough you might think yourself, tree bark was tougher.) 

She set her sword and shield down at close hand; there were not so many dangers this near Skyhold—Cullen’s soldiers kept the bandits at bay—but there were occasional sightings of bears and feral dogs. Then she pulled a roll of bandages from her pouch and used it to wrap her hands to protect her knuckles. The summer sunlight filtering through the trees fell warm on her skin; though being this far up the mountains made the winters long and icy, it seemed sometimes as though it also brought them closer to the sun. Cassandra considered, looked briefly around, and, determining herself to be alone, stripped off her tunic and undershirt. With only her tight training breastband on beneath, the warmth fell directly on the skin of her shoulders and back; a pleasant feeling, almost as tangible as a touch. 

She rolled her head on her neck and worked her shoulders to loosen up her joints and then began.

The first blows were simply to warm up, feeling out the texture of the tree, the thickness of the padding. Feeling out, too, her own muscles. She knew her body very well; it was her foremost tool, as much canvas for her talent as Varric’s blank page was for his. But nevertheless it was a tool she had to relearn each time. She paid attention with those first strikes to the way her biceps felt as they flexed, to the way her wrist and elbow and shoulder took the blow, to the way the muscles in her back and belly tensed and relaxed to keep her balanced. She shifted her feet, feeling out her center of gravity, pausing to stretch and work loose a tightness in her hips.

Then she began in earnest.

The blows fell hard and rapid. She feinted as if she was fighting a real opponent, shifting on her feet, ducking and dodging and coming up again with a hard punch, and then another. Bare-knuckle fighting was not something that she put into practice often; when she trained for unarmed combat, it was more akin to wrestling. Boxing in this fashion had little use except for tavern brawls, which Cassandra almost never found herself engaged in. 

But there was nothing like it for working off frustration.

The blows landed, solid, again and again; her breath came faster and harder and at some point without realizing it she had begun making sounds with each breath—first a grunt, just the edge of voice, as she landed each blow—and then louder, battle cries. She pounded the tree until its branches shook, all of her frustrations rising up in her: centuries of Seeker lies, horror and betrayal, Tranquility, deception, dark and complex magics, and it was as if each one purged itself through her fury and her fury purged itself into the trunk of the tree.

She continued until her biceps ached, until the muscles of her shoulders burned, until her knuckles (padded though they were by the quilting around the tree and the bindings around her hands) screamed at their constant abuse. She continued until sweat dripped from her brow and made a path down the back of her neck and over her shoulders to soak into her breastband. And still she continued, feeding her tension and vexation into the pure clean flame of her righteous anger and then spending her anger itself in the flex of her muscles, the solid thunk of her fists against the padding.

(The second time she had punched a tree had been a week after Anthony’s death. She had spent that week in a state of grey numbness, having to be coaxed simply to get out of bed, devoid of appetite, hollow inside as though—having wept miserably all through his interring in the Grand Necropolis—she had wept every feeling out of herself, leaving her utterly empty. 

And then, after a week, she had awoken late one morning in a state of such rage that it had left her mind incoherent, fragmented as a broken mirror. Heedless and unseeing she had fled her bed and her room without even dressing, whirling past her startled governess while still in her nightgown, out—barefoot—across the terrace. Anger, anger, anger—at what? At the Maker, at the world, at everything, for taking away Anthony, who she loved above anyone else. Anger at the injustice of the world losing the best person in it. And the anger was too much to hold in without going mad.

She remembered, still, with shattered-glass clarity, her fists falling on the tree, again and again and again until finally her governess found help in the strong-armed cook to drag her away.

Some days, she thought that the seed of that rage at the injustice of the world had never quite left her, that she had all her life only sought for and found ways to turn it to the cause of good.)

She continued until she was too breathless even to cry out, until the muscles of her stomach and lower back and legs tingled with the stress her brutal workout was putting on them, until sweat plastered her hair and sheened on her skin in the sunlight. The fire in her heart and her gut blazed up in a final flurry of blows—and then receded, did not leave her but simmered again to the place where she kept it, a bright ember in her heart but not one that controlled her.

Cassandra stood a moment, panting, eyes closed and face tilted up to the blue sky and the hot sun, allowing her awareness to extend once more outside her body. The cool breeze felt good against her flushed and sweaty skin, the ground steady and solid beneath her feet. The wood was silent for a few minutes—she had no doubt scared the birds away—save for the rustle of leaves in the wind, but then in the distance a bird called, and then another. The air was soft with the scent of greenery and of running water nearby, and she realized she was thirsty. She drew it all in, all of it, with the awareness she had learned when she was barely more than a girl preparing for her Vigil; drew it in, the whole world, and brought it into the place inside her that had until recently been murkily filled with frustration and pessimism, let the world fill her with clarity once again.

Cassandra opened her eyes again, then, and pulled a towel and a waterskin from her pouch. She drank a little, though not so much as to upset her stomach after such intense exercise, and wiped off her sweaty skin before donning her undershirt and tunic again, and then her sword and shield. She unpinned the quilted padding from the tree and unwound it, looping its length over her shoulder.

It was not far back to Skyhold, but far enough that she knew that the flush would have left her cheeks by the time she returned. Still, as she entered, Cullen looked up from where he was briefing the gate guards and gave her a surprised look. “I hadn’t realized you’d left.”

“I let Leliana know,” she said, “in case I was needed.”

“It isn’t that, I have every expectation that you are conscientious about such things. I was just curious.”

She could, perhaps, explain to Cullen; she thought he might understand. But for now, she said, “I was attempting to gain some perspective.”

“And were you successful?”

Cassandra smiled to herself. “Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the medieval Welsh poem Cad Goddeu, the [Battle of the Trees](http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/t08.html), which I will admit I picked partly for the amusement value of the name. :D
> 
> The bit about Cassandra's brother telling her to punch trees comes straight out of a bit of banter with Blackwall, and it was just too good to not use it with this prompt.


End file.
